It is estimated that 22 million homes and an additional 6 million businesses in the United States are equipped with some form of security or intrusion detection and/or alarm system. A number of those systems are monitored remotely by third party monitoring services. The five largest security monitoring companies account for over 10 million subscribers, at a rate of up to $600 per year, each. This ongoing operating expense should be avoided.
Moreover, third party monitoring systems suffer from certain drawbacks even when operating as intended. The third-party monitoring company employs monitors who collectively monitor all that company's clients. Those monitors may be overwhelmed by a surge in alarm states, delaying their response, and onward notification to the client. A third-party monitor may not have sufficient familiarity with each structure being monitored to make adequate use of the alarm information, absent a user's assistance. This makes the third-party monitoring solution sub-optimal for the task of remotely monitoring a security, intrusion detection, or alarm system. The present state of the art is therefore lacking.
U.S. Non Provisional patent application Ser. No. 15/655,033 (the “'033 Application”) filed Jul. 20, 2017, entitled “Security Monitoring System and Methods,” sought to address this shortcoming. An exemplary, non-limiting use of the '033 Application contemplates a situation in which a user (e.g., homeowner, property supervisor, etc.) has a previously installed alarm system that may not be connected to a monitoring service. Given the exorbitant costs of monitoring services, the system disclosed in the '033 Application is capable of saving users significant amounts of money and endowing unused alarm systems with purpose.